Surf trip gone wrong

A few months ago my boyfriend and I decided to plan a surf trip to Porto. We were very excited for this getaway as our last surf trip was almost one year ago. However, things didn’t go as we planned… Our ideal weekend was completely drenched. From the moment we landed to the moment we flew back to Hamburg, it didn’t stop raining, not even for an hour! Therefore, we had to cancel our surfing day – it was too dangerous – and decided to discover Porto underneath our almost broken umbrella.

We stayed in a hostel called Estrela Da Noite – a very simple but nice hostel not far from the city centre. I totally recommend it if you do not want to spend a lot in accommodation!

The first day we decided to walk around the nice (and most of the times very steep) streets of Porto. In the morning, we walked down Avenida dos Aliados, fell in love with the amazing blue and white tiles in the São Bento Station and sat down to eat some incredible cheese and wine in the Bolhao Market whilst we were waiting for the rain to stop (poor us we didn’t know that it wouldn’t stop..! haha)

At this point my poor Nike Roshe Run trainers were soaking wet. Therefore, I went into a shoe shop and bought the cheapest rain boots I could find, which actually were very cute and stylish haha – you can see them in one of the photos in this post 😉

After that “pit stop”, we continued wandering around the city, saw the famous Lello e Irmao bookstore that served as inspiration for JK Rowling to write Harry Potter and sat again to have proper lunch at a typical Portuguese restaurant with amazing food and huge servings. From there, we decided to visit the San Francisco church as it was just in front of the restaurant. If you’re the type of person that, like me, loves to see every city you visit from high above, this church is the perfect place to go as you can go up its tower and get a nice overview of whole Porto.

Later on that day, we found a very cute cafe called Leitaria Da Baixa where we sheltered from the rain for a while and had some delicious cake and wonderful hot chocolate.

The last thing we had in mind that day was to explore Ribeira and try to find a nice restaurant where we could eat our first francesinha ever. And we found it and it was amazing! After that, we went back to the hostel where we were staying to try to digest all the food we had eaten haha

Day 2 came by and we had four objectives: sit by the sea, walk around the Crystal Palace Garden, cross the Don Luis I Bridge and last and most important goal, get the flight back to Hamburg. So we tried to do all that without being too successful… We spent hours trying to find the gardens to get there and see that there wasn’t much to do as it was pouring rain, and when we got to the beach it was too windy to take a stroll down the promenade. However, we were able to cross the huge bridge to take some nice pictures of Porto from the other side of the Duero and we were quick enough to be at the airport in time 🙂

Although the weather was horrible during our getaway, we really enjoyed visiting Porto and we would love to to explore Lisbon next or even try to plan another surf trip somewhere cool in Portugal – any suggestions?

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Hello!

Born and raised in sunny Barcelona only to find myself living in Munich and struggling to say out loud some German words. Black outfit enthusiast but lover of white and minimalist interiors. An avid supporter of not-doing-anything days but passionate about traveling around the world and discovering what's around me.